Agreement Errors in Norwegian L1, English L2 Quantity Pseudopartitives

The pseudopartitive is a construction which is used by L2 learners but is not taught explicitly in Norwegian schools. Further, it shows non-canonical agreement properties (agreement with the embedded noun), which may make it challenging for learners. In this study, we investigated subject-verb agreement accuracy in quantity pseudopartitives among Norwegian L1, English L2 learners. English and Norwegian show similar headedness properties for the pseudopartitive, but unlike English, Norwegian lacks a system of verbal agreement. We collected learner data from the Tracking Written Learner Language corpus (Dirdal et al. 2022), and found a subject-verb agreement error rate of 29.1%, suggesting that despite the overlap in headedness in the two languages, learners struggle to produce agreement correctly. We also found cases of negative transfer, mostly related to specific lexical items (lack, pair). Altogether, this shows that the negative transfer of some properties, e.g. agreement marking, may limit the positive transfer of other structures, e.g. headedness in pseudopartitives.